If you're one of the developers that have the basics of the language down and want to improve your skills to the next level, you'd do well to check out this post from Webgeekly.com packed with little helpful hints you can use to make your life easier.

PHP is a very versatile programming language that can achieve the same objective in multiple ways. You can read more about that in my 'The Art of Programming' post. Below are a few tips I've picked up from past projects that can improve your code readability and maintainability and make you a neater, more organized PHP programmer.

There's lots of useful hints included - most of them are relatively basic, but they can even be helpful as reminders for those seasoned developers:

Johannes Schluter has posted a bit more information about the scalar type hinting that's been included in the main development line of the PHP language (trunk).

Some time ago I wrote an article about the implementation of type hints for non-object types for PHP. Meanwhile many things happened and that implementation was replaced by a different one. Readers of my previous post might know that I have doubts about type hints in PHP.

He shows some of the example syntax for the hinting and points out how, in one case, there's no error thrown when the type hint is a native one but an error is thrown on a custom type hint.

So why is there a syntax added which is ignored? [...] Well, I let it to you to decide whether it make sense to have two syntaxes which look the same but do very different things (being ignored vs. throwing a terminating error) and whether it makes sense to push a system where the core language behaves differently depending on the system. [...] I seriously hoped PHP was out of the era of introducing new inconsistencies.

Well, if you happen to be one of those more seasoned PHP developers, this post is for you. Our expert panel has returned to offer helpful hints and suggestions for those of you who have long since passed the "beginner" milestone and are on your way to becoming true masters of the art and science of PHP. Feel free to ask questions and leave your own suggestions in the comments - the lovely people we interviewed in this post are quite likely to pop in and reply to you directly.